I am using the Longman handbook, which I am reviewing (as part of the job hunt), to look up the MLA citation style of a review published by Longman (as part of my thesis).

So after a conversation with my sister and brother-in-law last weekend, I’ve been thinking about one of those questions that literature students always get and never, I think, know exactly how to answer. Basically it asks why literature is so elliptical, and therefore elitist.

Let me qualify. My sister and brother-in-law are both well-educated, especially in their fields of IT communications and geology, respectively. They’re smart, well off, and entirely satisfied with where their education has gotten them in life.

My brother-in-law likes to maintain that, other than being kind of nice, literature is pretty useless, and literature professors are doing everything they can to dupe universities into thinking the opposite. My sister just says she doesn’t “get it.”

We were arguing about religion the other night, which we do frequently, and which really gets all of us thinking on all cylinders. I brought up Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of my favorite novels, to talk about agnosticism and the feeling of being abandoned by an imperceivable God who, in Hardy’s words, “must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel.” The allusion seemed to catch my brother-in-law’s attention (I think he thinks that all of nineteenth-century literature assumes the omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness of God without question), and as he was intrigued by the psychology of agnosticism, we kept talking about it.

Within a few minutes, though, the conversation turned to literature. Why did Hardy need to write the novel, my brother-in-law asked, if that’s what he was saying in it? Why didn’t he just come out and say it? Putting it in novel form seemed like just another conspiracy to keep the wrong people from “getting it” and thus maintaining that they had something to teach.

One answer, I suppose, is that this is my interpretation of the novel; whether or not it’s what Hardy meant to write is another story. We can get into these is-the-author-dead conversations, but it doesn’t help with my brother-in-law’s primary, rather Marxist, question: why is what’s said through literature impossible to convey directly in a manner that a “layperson”–that is, one without a strong education in literature, or a strong background in reading it–would understand? These are people for whom irony has little resonance; of “he was not the least of men” and “he was the greatest man” they would see the latter as more laudatory (the author of Beowulf would argue with that, I fear); and you can’t tell them that they are supposed to feel the opposite because that’s just not how literature actually works. If I can say “being an agnostic makes you mad at God,” and a list of other statements about what the novel is “saying,” why bother writing the novel and then having to teach people how to make those interpretations?

I know all of the arguments for how literature evokes emotion rather than telling you about it (though again, it just doesn’t seem to evoke those emptions in precisely those people who are questioning its value); I know that we all have different interpretations, new ones every day; I know that when kids analyze literature they learn critical thinking skills. But in my brother-in-law’s ideal, practical world, all those things could be done away with (though it would be rather like 1984, perhaps). Maybe all we’re left with at the end of the day is literature’s beauty: that’s the reason that it has triumphed over Newspeak as a better way of communicating. Maybe they believe there’s a version of 1984 that actually works and doesn’t degrade the subject? But Orwell denies that possibility. But I can’t use that argument: they don’t want literature to justify its own existence; they need outside proof.

My great worry here is that as education becomes more specialized, especially at the big state schools, a whole segment of the population will be skeptical of literature to the point of thinking about conspiracies and such. Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been large portions of the population who were not exposed to a literary education before this time. Especially after the institution of public education in the nineteenth century, there was a growing divide between those educated persons who were given a liberal, classical education (upper classes), and those given a much more practical education in the sciences (middle classes). And part of the reason that public education was even begun was that upper-class voters feared that the newly enfranchised middle classes would “vote wrong.” But the fear of those upper-crusters then looks like it might be coming to pass now: practical education is overtaking an education in the humanities that I believe still has immense value. I don’t like that such thinking places me with the upper-crusters, but there it is.

This is turning into a class debate, but I want to keep literature itself in the picture: how can literature and the study of literature continue to justify its existence if the growing majority of people cannot understand it, or choose not to bother? What makes literature so great? Why literature?

At the Oscarrrrs!

This is my favorite photo from this year’s Academy Awards:

The New York Times, February 26, 2007

It has a touch of Cinderella to it, the way everyone is standing just a bit apart from Penélope, as if the force of her beauty is keeping them at arm’s length. The divide between the world of the crowd and the world of Penélope and the photographers is is more than one of space: it’s one of light, color, time (the hustle and bustle of the stampete versus her statuesque image), and chronology (looks like she belongs in the glory days of Hollywood). The framing of the picture, with the enormous Oscar looking massively and impassively away from the scene, seems ominous to me–not regal, as I think it was meant to.

huzzah, books!

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf (I’m taking multiple crosses to mean multiple editions), and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

(I’m going to add “indifference” as a category by not marking some at all).

+1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
+++2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
++5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
++6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
++7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
+++8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) *
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) *
+11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
+14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
++16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)*
18. The Stand (Stephen King)*
+19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
+20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
+21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
+22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)*
+25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
+28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
+34. 1984 (Orwell)
+35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
+36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)*
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
+39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)*
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
+++45. Bible
+46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
+49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
+50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
+52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
+53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
++54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)*
+57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)*
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)*
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
+61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)*
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)*
+66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
+68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
+++70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) +
+73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
+75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)*
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)*
+80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)*
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)*
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)*
++85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)*
+87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)*
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)*
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)*
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)*
+92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)*
+94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)*
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)*
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford) *
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)*
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Kipling has some terrific metaphors. I think Orwell would like this one in particular:

“Now a break in a railway system produces much the same effect as a break in a word or a lizard. The two sundered sections grow exceedingly lively.”

I’ve been listening to a lot of Coldplay lately. It’s chill, good working music; it reflects my kind of quiet sadness at having Tim far away. Their sound has that same open windsweptness as the music of Sigur Rós and Martin Lauridsen (one of my favorite choral composers). Winter as both quiet and exciting, subdued and cozy and frightening, tormented and comfortable.

Maybe this is why I’m writing my thesis on climate.

Well, I’m back in Charlottesville now, and have apparently, since Christmas, been going through an output dry spell. Does this ever happen to anyone else? It’s not just that I’m not producing proper work (I actually have been adding pages, however dreary, to my thesis), but that I haven’t got much to say other than that. I just feel that I should put something up here to voice my continuing existence.

Instead of writing, I have been soaking in things: while I was recuperating from having the wisdom taken out of me (all four wisdom teeth! and I learned that they’re called such in many Indo-European languages), I read a few Rider Haggard novels and a Marryat novel: so lots of imperial adventure there. My mom got me a BBC Dickens collection for Christmas, so we watched a lot of those. I moved on to Christmas gifts soon and have been working through Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” a popular scientific study of language and cognition (much in the style of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”). I’m also auditing a course on cartography this semester, and since barnesandnoble.com is slow, the first few books on my syllabus have not arrived, so I’m immersing myself in the later books, which have arrived, and which are fabulous. Who knew the theories of cartography were exactly the same as those of literature, but with visual theory added in (more like visual poetry, I suppose)? It’s dense but wonderful.

Oh, and over break Tim and I went to the Folger and drooled on their exhibit of early modern writing life after the advent of printing. One of my favorite displays was of the cryptographic methods used at the time; one was called a “casement letter.” Both parties, writer and recipient, would have a physical guide to writing, called a casement, which was essentially a piece of thick, stiff paper with little windows cut out. This would be placed over a sheet of paper and the letter would be composed in the windows. Then the casement would be removed and the rest of the sheet of paper would be filled in with random sentences, so it would be impossible, in effect, to figure out the content of the true letter. The recipient would place their copy of the casement over the letter when they received it, and voila, the original letter would appear. With the casement over the page, though, the letters are suggestive of Jess’s work in Organic Funiture Cellar. There’s a sense of lightness to the page, and also a sense of being let in to view scattered bits of something. I guess what I’m saying is that in both cases the sense of confusion is strongly accompanied by the joy of being able to see even pieces of something, of being let in just for a little bit, of a child standing on tiptoe at a high window to glance at the sky.

Anyway, the kitchen timer calls: must take pasta out. More later?

For a lot of people, at the center of Christmas are family, friends, laughter, and cookies. Call me cold and heartless, but the center of Christmas, to me, is still the religious principle, the magnum mysterium of the divine becoming earthly, the ideal becoming real (maybe I’ve been reading too much Plato). This morning’s gospel reading was the beginning of St. John, my favorite passage in the Bible–you know, the “in the beginning was the Word” one. One line particularly struck me because of our running theme in Chaucer class all semester, and in thinking about it I realized that in those lines is what I believe to be the true meaning of Christmas:

And the Word became flesh;
And made his dwelling among us.

My Chaucer professor got us all quite interested in the poetics of dwelling: what it means to dwell and how we express that meaning through language. Dwelling, we learned, originally implied a temporary state: to dwell meant to linger, but only for a while. Part of learning how to “dwell” on this earth is learning how to deal with our own temporariness. God, in theory, never needs to deal with this sense; he is the binary opposite of temporality. But in Christianity, the birth of Christ represents God allowing himself to become temporary for a time, to “dwell”–to linger–among us.

But dwelling is not just being. It’s a way of being (see Heidegger); it’s the way we interact with the space around us. Dwelling means dealing with that world, its people, its weather, its fate, its greenery. To make a dwelling means both to build a house, and to build this kind of relationship with the world. Christ, John is telling us, built his home here on earth, with all the temporality that that implies.

There’s something marvellous there, especially in the idea that it’s the “word” that’s coming to build its dwelling with us. John was so deeply aware of language that he managed to write the entire opening to his gospel writing about it and its limits–and God–all at the same time. The word become flesh indeed.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and much love to everyone else.

the spring-sounding birds (you know the ones i mean) are chirping ferociously outside, as the fog is beginning to lift over newly-greened night-rain grass. the temperature’s low, but swiftly rising with the clouds, making me feel like wearing pretty bright colors and light things, struggling through with only a sweater when i really maybe should be wearing a jacket on top. there’s even a holidayish smell to the air, a twinge of stillness and excitement and worry whether i remembered everything i wanted to do for the family gathering. yes indeed, it sure feels like easter morning.

Fine, fine. I’ll give it a go.

The first poem I remember reading was…
Just with my eyes? “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” Really understanding that there’s more to poetry than rhyme and a meter? “The Waste Land,” senior year of high school. I remember writing, in green ballpoint pen, on the top of the first page, “THIS is poetry???”

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and…
…this statement is not as true as it should be. Kids should have to memorize far more poetry than they do. The only poetry I ever had to memorize before college was in French; to this day I can still recite “La Cigale et la Fourmi” and wow my friends in the French Department here (thank you Madame Amiry). But memorizing these poems and the Middle and Old English verses I learned by heart in college gave me something more than brilliant party conversation material. Memorization heightens awareness. Knowing each word, each pause, each punctuation mark and accent made me think about them more, makes me feel them more. On a practical level, such close attention taught me the grammar of each language better than any fill-in-the-blank quizzes or parsing assignments; I also thing that memory games like this help strengthen memory itself. But on a soulfully practical level, I feel like I could really only begin to read a poem once I’d memorized it. It’s partially the fact that you have to spend a good deal of time with a poem to memorize it (if you’re me anyway), and partially the power that comes from knowing how it all fits together and what comes before what, being able to keep the whole poem in your head simultaneously at the same time as knowing how it runs chronologically. If only I had the discipline to keep memorizing poetry now…it makes me wonder how my poetry papers would be different if I memorized each verse before I wrote.

I read poetry because…
I am looking for an expression of something I feel strongly, with or without knowing it.

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem…
is Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” It’s so comforting and homey and absolutely revolutionary and transgressive all at once. And probably more importantly, Wordsworth and I agree about the importance of place.

I write poetry, but…
…nobody is ever meant to see it. It’s me venting, and is very teenage-angsty. No pretensions of greatness. Line breaks occur entirely for dramatic effect and have nothing to do with meter. In her self-effacing introduction to “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono,” Dar Williams captures exactly the combination of fondness and contempt that I have for my poetry.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature…
In some ways, a lot. Intensity. It’s just so rich. I wonder if a poem could survive if it weren’t in some way like chocolate ganache. But I also like to question why we don’t call prose poetry; in children’s literature, for example, they overlap a lot. Is The Cat in the Hat a poem? Is Goodnight, Moon? Czeslaw Milosz wrote prose poetry, as did Baudelaire. How does the opening to Bleak House differ from these works? Indeed, how does it differ from the opening to “Prufrock”?

I find poetry…
…everywhere I look? on the third shelf up on my big bookcase? difficult?

The last time I heard poetry…
We read most of the poems on our syllabus aloud this semester in Late Victorian lit. It’s amazing how few of us know how to read poetry aloud (me included, definitely). One or two of the readings were okay. But we don’t know how to relish words without making it sound forced. Hence we either over- or undercompensate, with effects that leave the poet turning in his grave and the rest of us squirming in our seats. It’s a delicate and difficult and rigid balance–but somehow it feels so right and free and easy when you finally hear it.

I think poetry is like…
…similes.